Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.
At least we'll always have the first, best UT.
Sadly, there's no way for those on Apple Silicon to play it :'(
Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
471–480 of 733 posts
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...
How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge
>aging engines
Gaming companies get a lot of crap for this - it seems unfair. The OS I'm using to write this is a relative newcomer at only 30 years old. Obviously, it has changed a lot in that time, but so have the engines. Most software doesn't get rewritten, it evolves.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco se…
I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.
To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company.
However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty.
Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced.
It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?"
They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can.
As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#474This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…
While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it. So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small…
If AWS actually tried to abuse its power, it would really damage the tech industry. Tech companies would see the risk and start treating the cloud as rented machines (EC2), and stop realizing all the benefits of their provider managing a complex system on their behalf.
If I were AWS, I'd willingly write into contracts that costs can go up no faster than the PPI + 5%, barring some sort of force majeure. Hardware gets cheaper, so I'd expect costs to come down, but this essentially "we're not going to screw you" clause.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody can take away your rights if the contract you sign with the engine developer doesn't allow it, as people have been pointing out is the case for other engines. IIRC Unreal's contract gives you access to a particular version of the engine in perpetuity, with source and the permission to make your own additions/changes to that source. It doesn't guarantee updates, but neither does the MIT license.
Apparently this is exactly what is happening with Unity[1], where the TOS previously said that you can continue using an old version, but now they are walking this back and trying to apply fees retroactively. Whether this is legal or not might be debatable, but unless users mount a legal challenge they are probably stuck paying or finding another engine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499731
Honestly, the first thing I thought when I heard the story was “sounds like a lawsuit.”
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
But history has shown them get cheaper and more capable over time for nearly every example you gave.
Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_ gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually bite their users. There isn't enough space to list the closed source software tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo, IronRuby, and Silverlight.
It rather looks like it depends on who makes the product. One thing to look at is who has established trust and (so far) maintained that trust. For example, AWS has said that their products will get cheaper over time and that they wont deprecate any. The fact that they've managed to do that for 15 years or so means they have a built a lot of trust - which is itself an investment that they would be foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that trust.
Meanwhile, Google has firmly established that they will destroy any product at any time, and you would be insane to build a business on their products.
Adobe and Microsoft make meh products that dominate industries, and you are at their whim, and look, these two companies provide all your examples. (And to be fair, SourceSafe went away because it was not reliable and any sane business paying for a VCS switched to perforce before eventually moving to git like everyone else).
IBM will sell you anything as long as it's called "Watson" so who knows which Watson has been discontinued or not.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. How can you say that when unreal exists? They are dominant in PC and even used in many large mobile games.
They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice.
Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it.
Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.
> Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade Any chance you have an example? I can't recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.
Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But they probably would have if they had thought of it. But the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was most certainly there.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.
Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors than FOSS projects usually have.
It is incredible. Truly incredible. I know of no other FOSS project that comes close.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it. So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small…
If AWS actually tried to abuse its power, it would really damage the tech industry. Tech companies would see the risk and start treating the cloud as rented machines (EC2), and stop realizing all the benefits of their provider managing a complex system on their behalf. If I were AWS, I'd willingly write into contracts that costs can go up no faster than the PPI + 5%, barring some sort of force majeure. Hardware gets…
Such a platform should be a co-op owned by all the users, designed for the public good. It really is almost like a piece of infrastructure.
But AWS is a business, and businesses are there to make money. They are there to extract as much money as possible from users. I doubt they'll ever do a big change like Unity, but I bet they end up with a slow boil of raising prices.